Online surveys are a great way to collect information from customers (and potential customers) that will help you quickly grow your business. Surveys can allow you to gather information, get new ideas, and engage with your customers in a meaningful way.
Not that long ago, conducting surveys was an expensive and sophisticated endeavor, which means very few companies could afford to do it. Today, however, there are improved processes, online surveying tools like Helpfull, and a wide range of software and firmware options that make conducting surveys affordable and straightforward. Here’s how you can best make a survey for your business.
Your objective
Surveys can be set up to collect information overtime or on demand as the needs of your business change over time. You can create a survey to examine trends or changes in consumer feelings and habits. You can also use surveys to determine the potential for products and services.
Your first step should be to determine what your objective is in conducting a survey. What information and insight do you hope to gain from the survey? What you want the result to be will determine how you create the survey, what questions you ask, when it is administered, and how those questions are worded. Without a clear objective going into the survey, it’s difficult to know how to analyze the information you get from the survey.
The questions
When writing your survey questions, there are a couple of things you need to keep in mind. First, keep all the wording and sentences simple and to the point. If they are confusing or hard to read, your survey results may not be reflective of what you need to know. Stay away from any hot topic words that will get a strong reaction. You also need to avoid abbreviations or slang as readers may not understand them.
To get answers that you can quantify, the questions need to be either yes/no questions or multiple choice. Close-ended questions will allow you to analyze the information gleaned from the responses comparatively. Open-ended questions that force survey-takers to write out an answer or explanation to the answer makes it difficult to give each answer a quantitative value.
Surveys also need to be short to reduce the impact of reader fatigue. Reader fatigue is when the person taking the survey is merely tired of answering questions and begins to rush. This leads to them not thoroughly reading the questions or reading them at all; they start filling in answers to get it finished.
Other factors
Have a set duration for your survey and monitor its progress throughout. You may be able to identify flaws in your survey quickly, which you can fix and keep moving forward. Alternatively, as you examine the results, you may see weaknesses in your survey that allow you to create a better one in the future. Monitoring your survey is also essential, so you can identify your response rate, or the percentage of people who had access to your survey that complete it.
If you experience a low response rate, you may need to alter how the survey is presented to potential survey-takers. For example, was the survey an option on your website? Was it sent in a link via email, or was it pushed on social media? Where the survey was presented and significantly impacted the percentage of people who respond.
When you end the survey and have the results, present them in an easy to examine format. This may be a pie chart, graph, or another visual tool. Having the results written out is highly useful: being able to visualize the results is beneficial for most people when trying to focus on the most valuable information.
To read more on topics like this, check out the business category.
Leave a Reply